Cin/cout/cerr

Question

is there a good explanation for cin/cout/cerr, involving pipes etc?

Answer 1

I have found a good explanation:

cin means read a value from stdin (which is usually the console, but can be for example piped from another file)

cout means write to stdout (which is usually the console, but can be used with a pipe to pipe the output to another program's stdin)

cerr means write to stderr (which is usually also the console, but is still printed if stdout is piped to another program)

piping on *nix systems works like this:

$ a.out | b.out